Nothing mattered except states of mind, chiefly our own.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNESIt economics is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.
More John Maynard Keynes Quotes
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The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Never in history was there a method devised of such efficacy for setting each country’s advantage at variance with its neighbours’ as the international gold (or, formerly, silver) standard.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
There is no harm in being sometimes wrong – especially if one is promptly found out.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists .
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Ideas, knowledge, art, hospitality, travel – these are things which should in their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible and above all let finance be primarily national.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Economists must leave to Adam Smith alone the glory of the Quarto, must pluck the day, fling pamphlets into the wind, write always sub specie temporis , and achieve immortality by accident, if at all.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The treasury could fill old bottles with banknotes and bury them, and leave it to private enterprises on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the means of securing an approximation to full employment.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Well, when I get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new information?
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Once doubt begins it spreads rapidly.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at your mercy.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Economics is a very dangerous science.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES -
I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES